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Climate Terror

A Critical Geopolitics of Climate Change

verfasst von: Sanjay Chaturvedi, Timothy Doyle

Verlag: Palgrave Macmillan UK

Buchreihe : New Security Challenges

Enthalten in: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

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Climate Terror engages with a highly differentiated geographical politics of global warming. It explores how fear-inducing climate change discourses could result in new forms of dependencies, domination and militarised 'climate security'.

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Inhaltsverzeichnis

Frontmatter

1. An Introduction: A Critical Geopolitics of ‘Climate Fear/Terror’: Roots, Routes and Rhetoric

Abstract

On the ‘doomsday clock’ of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which intends to caution ‘how close humanity is to catastrophic destruction’, ‘climate change’ joins the other two alarmist categories, namely ‘nuclear,’ and ‘biosecurity’. At the same time, there is a grudging acknowledgement of the fact, at least by some, that the geopolitics of fear, deployed at diverse sites by different agencies — individually and/or collectively — in pursuit of various interests and agendas, has failed to yield the desired results, including a change in public and private behavior and for that matter the ushering in of radical social movements (Lilley 2012). On the contrary, it appears to have resulted in ‘catastrophe fatigue, the paralyzing effects of fear, the pairing of overwhelmingly bleak analysis with inadequate solutions, and a misunderstanding of the process of politicization’ (ibid.:16; emphasis added). Could this be the reason that some of these multifaceted discourses of fear — that somehow remain open to political contestation and interrogation — are now being scaled up and upgraded by various regulatory agencies and alliances to the discourse of ‘climate terror’? This discourse can only have counter-terror as its Other in order to completely erase the hope (the Other of fear) of re-ordering and regulating spaces and societies allegedly more vulnerable to climate change and its threat-multiplying effects.

Sanjay Chaturvedi, Timothy Doyle

2. Climate ‘Science’: Categories, Cultures and Contestations

Abstract

It is not our intention here, as stated clearly and necessarily in the opening pages of this book, to pit climate change deniers against climate change advocates; it is not our objective to argue who is right. Rather, we are willing to accept that the weight of evidence seems to be heavily in favor of those scientists who do believe that human-induced climate change will become an increasing feature of our global physical and social environments. As social scientists, however, it is not sufficient to simply make a judgment in defense of those advocating a particular scientific position. Rather, we are interested in what kind of ‘science’ (knowledge in all its forms) is being articulated; why it is being pursued; which scientists are advocating these positions; and, what are the geopolitical outcomes of these scientific findings and solicitations. Science is largely a human construct. In this book, however, we acknowledge that there also exist essential ‘natural’, non-human forces, which are larger than the agency of homo-sapiens can allow for, imagine, or control. But where the human agency/essentialist nature balance becomes problematic is when understandings of an ‘essentialist nature’ are used to empower certain minority world communities to the detriment of others living and surviving in majority worlds.

Sanjay Chaturvedi, Timothy Doyle

3. Terrorizing Climate Territories and Marginalized Geographies of the Post-Political

Abstract

In academic and popular discourses alike, ‘climate change’ is often framed as a ‘global challenge’; a threat beyond borders. This allegedly ‘global’ character of global warming (often taken as a defining feature of climate politics) portrays climate change as the paradigmatic global environmental problem. Its presumed globality links the climate issue to a broader discussion within international relations and critical geopolitics about the contemporary role of territory and political boundaries. The flows of people, capital and carbon across boundaries are perceived as indicators of a post-Westphalia world, stipulated and stereotyped as a deterritorialized and borderless political space. Climate change is thus contrasted in this discourse with a spatiality of global politics which is constructed as territorial, the parcelling up of the world into discrete political units. It is further approached and analyzed by some in terms of ‘ trans-national security threats’, based on the geopolitical premise that ‘predicted climate change impacts are also likely to strengthen or help revive sub-state networks that have traditionally responded to environmental change and pressure via violence, crime, smuggling, banditry, trafficking, terrorism, and other such activities’ (Jasparro and Taylor 2008: 232).

Sanjay Chaturvedi, Timothy Doyle

4. The Violence of Climate ‘Markets’: Insuring ‘Our Way of Living’

Abstract

Larry Lohman (2008: 364) has persuasively questioned the belief that climate justice is all about ‘ re-energizing or reforming development and investment in the global South to steer it in a low-carbon direction, harnessing the potential of carefully constructed green markets, or making capital flow from North to South, instead of from South to North’. To do so, argues Lohman, amounts to putting a gloss over the ‘lessons gained from more than a half-century’s popular and institutional experience of what development — neo-liberal or otherwise — actually does.’ Lohmann rightly asks: ‘what does the project of a just solution to the climate crisis become once it is associated with or incorporated into an economic development or carbon market framework?’ To quote Lohmann, ‘… carbon trading as part of the “climate development” package that has become entrenched at national and international levels over the past ten years, is organized in ways that make it more difficult even to see what the central issues of climate justice are, much less to take action on them’ (ibid).

Sanjay Chaturvedi, Timothy Doyle

5. ‘Climate Borders’ in the Anthropocene: Securitizing Displacements, Migration and Refugees

Abstract

At the heart of contemporary, fast multiplying climate-security narratives originating largely (but not entirely) from the global North are the imaginative geographies of millions of impoverished Afro-Asians being uprooted and displaced from their habitat and crossing borders in search of the greener and securer pastures. The latest 5th Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has for the first time added a detailed discussion on ‘human security’ and ‘sustainable development’ in Chapter 20 of Working Group II. This undoubtedly is a welcome addition to the IPCC agenda and to some extent blunts the social science critiques of its earlier four assessment reports. Having said that, the citation above raises a number of complex questions, largely unaddressed, about the context in which to approach the complex but connected issues of climate induced displacements (cited hereafter as CID) and climate induced migrations (cited hereafter as CIM).

Sanjay Chaturvedi, Timothy Doyle

6. Climate Security and Militarization: Geo-Economics and Geo-Securities of Climate Change

Abstract

Although there have been conflicts over resources since the earliest human societies, interest in both renewable and non-renewable resources within environmental security frameworks has dramatically increased since the end of the Cold War (Doyle 2008). Security is usually understood in state-centric terms, ‘concerned with intentional physical (mainly military) threats to the integrity and independence of the nation-state’ (Scrivener 2002: 184).

Sanjay Chaturvedi, Timothy Doyle

7. Climate Justice: An Attempt at an Emancipatory Politics of Climate Change

Abstract

In recent times, the greater prominence of climate discourses amongst majority world environmentalists has occurred due to the fact that some of the world’s biggest polluters and/or reliers on fossil fuels have still not signed or endorsed the climate change protocols in Copenhagen, Kyoto, Johannesburg, Bali, and others in any realistic fashion. As far back as October 2002, for example, 5,000 people from communities in India, including international NGOs, gathered in a Rally for Climate Justice in New Delhi. This rally was organized to coincide with the United Nations meeting on climate change (Conference of Parties 8 — COP8), and was organized by the India Climate Justice Forum, including the National Alliance of People’s Movements, the National Fishworkers’ Forum, the Third World Network, and CorpWatch. At this 2002 protest, Friends of the Earth International (FoEI) expressed frustration with climate change negotiations:

But climate negotiations show no progress and communities are calling for urgent action to address climate change and to protect their livelihoods in a manner that is consistent with human rights, worker’s rights, and environmental justice … Given the entrenched opposition to action from the fossil fuel industry and governments like the US and Saudi Arabia, environmental organisations joined forces with social movements in order to progress this most urgent agenda. The window of opportunity to prevent dangerous climate change is closing fast and, for many communities, the impacts are already alarmingly present.

Sanjay Chaturvedi, Timothy Doyle

8. Making ‘Climate Futures’: Power, Knowledge and Technologies

Abstract

Our critical geopolitical analysis in the book has shown thus far that a number of ‘climate futures’ are competing with one another for greater salience, legitimacy and authority. Each seems bent upon proving its ‘presence’ by canvassing itself as more effective in countering ‘global emergency’, while claiming at the same time the high moral ground. Our key argument in this chapter is that discursively speaking, the idea of ‘Climate Change’, despite the overwhelming scientific evidence that it demands and deserves serious policy planning and effective action, is being slowly but surely turned into a site of shadow boxing where a variety of actors, institutions and agencies are implanting their own maps of meaning on spaces (terrestrial, oceanic, atmospheric) that they perceive as the most ‘strategic’, in pursuit of their respective geopolitical and geoeconomic agendas. Mike Hulme (2009: 340– 341) is quite persuasive in his astute observation that it could be most revealing to

examine climate change as an idea of the imagination rather than a problem to be solved. By approaching climate change as an idea to be mobilized to fulfill a variety of tasks, (the pursuit of profit, national security, human security, climate justice etc.) perhaps we can see what climate change can do for us rather what we seek to do, despairingly, for (or to) climate.

Sanjay Chaturvedi, Timothy Doyle

Backmatter

Titel: Climate Terror
verfasst von: Sanjay Chaturvedi
Timothy Doyle
Copyright-Jahr: 2015
Verlag: Palgrave Macmillan UK
Electronic ISBN: 978-1-137-31895-4
Print ISBN: 978-0-230-24962-2
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137318954